My wife who's a lecturer recently got given an assignment. She was supposed to come up with a document to list out some guidelines for students in choosing the development platform for their final year projects. So she asked me to just give her a quick run down of what I know. I told her I only knew about .Net, and very little about JSP web developement... but even without knowledge of JSP web developement I did recently witness someone setting up an enviroment for a DB driven JSP developement and it involved the following steps.

1. Install TomCat (web server)
2. Install the Java SDK
3. Configure TomCat to use the Java SDK installed
4. Install MySQL
5. Install a MySQL management GUI
6. Mount the DB file to MySQL
7. Pray the setup works properly

Then I thought about what a student would go through if he was trying to do ASP.Net 2.0 developement, naturally as a student the enviroment of choice would obviously be Visual Web Developer Express. So... what steps are required to get a developement enviroment ready for a DB Driven ASP.Net 2.0 website?

1. Install Visual Web Developer Express with the SQL Server 2005 option checked.

Hmmm... maybe I should have listed the download as a step as well! ;)

But that's the truth about it, VWD is just a very good integrated enviroment for web developement. It uses a self contained web server to host the site for debuging hence you don't need to worry about setting up IIS virtual directories and what not, the only setting you need to do to get the server up and running would probably be your firewall complaining about the hosting process... ONCE.. and that's it, web setup done! If you can even call it a setup.

Then for the DB side, all you need to do is to dump the SQL Database MDF file in the APP_DATA folder and your code can access it, cause SQL2k5Express will load the DB in proc, so you don't have to worry about how to mount the DB in your SQL server.

And, not only is this good for the student. For the lecturer to get the students project up and running so they can be marked all the lecturer needs to do is to copy the solution and all it's files and open it in their copy of VWD. And not muck around mounting DBs, setting up web shares etc. etc. It's a win win situation.

As I was explaning all this to my wife, she interjects and says that has nothing to do with ease of developement. But I remind her that with less trouble and hassle setting up the enviroment, it means that student has more time developing their application so it is an important factor!

Of course I can't compare JSP features to ASP.Net 2.0 since I'm pretty clueless about what are the features in JSP. But ASP.Net 2.0 just gives you so much, a lot of base functions are already included in the .Net framework freeing the programmer up to make the application the programmer wants and not having to worry about getting the plumbing done.